Is your back linking strategy OK in Google’s books?

Years ago when I first dabbled in search engine optimization, back-links were the main component of achieving high rankings in Google. Which led to often questionable tactics to increase rankings such as blog comment spam and forum spam.

A long time client of mine learned the hard way that quantity is not always better than quality.

After getting quite good results from my SEO, they thought to get a head from the competition and get another well know SEO specialist to build links back to their site.

This saw their website affected by Google’s Penguin update.

This company which I will not name outsourced the links to an Indian company who manged to get thousands of backlinks for their three main keywords from many completely irrelevant sites around the world.

The main issue faced was the top three keywords were seen in Google’s eyes as unnatural so they no longer come up on the first page in Google.

Naturally I am back on the job. I am choosing to do nothing about the dodgy links but to focus on plenty of good link building techniques such as social media profiles, updates and articles with the keyword’s being brand based.

Some would disagree about doing nothing about the old links but the reality of the situation is that most of these sites have disappeared over the last few months due to the thousands of other webmasters bombing the site owners with requests to remove their links or face legal action.

So just to sum it up, focus on brand links as your main anchored links. e.g: